Disk partitioning for Linux

When installing any operating system onto your PC, one of the black arts is how to partition the disk. These days, Microsoft Windows encourages you to have a single partition (i.e. the C: drive). SUSE Linux defaults to about 3 partitions. I use a different partitioning (which I found suggested somewhere a while back). For SUSE 9.2/9.3 Pro, what worked for me was the following partitions:

1. /boot, 16M, ext filesystem
2. swap partition, 2G
3. /, 1G
4. logical partition, rest of disk, which contains the following:
5. /usr, 4G
6. /var, 1G
7. /opt, 4G
8. /home, rest of logical partition.

The only issue I had with this was that, due to the various software applications I had added, the /usr partition had creeped up to over 90% full. Where I can, I install software into /opt, but most SUSE software comes in RPM format, and doesn't give you a choice of installation directory; it usually installs somewhere in /usr. So, as I had decided to do a fresh install of SUSE 10, I took the opportunity to change my partitioning arrangements. I have a 300G disk on the machine in question, so it seemed best to be a bit more generous with the gigabytes to avoid running out of space in the partitions in future. I now have

1. /boot, 16M, ext filesystem
2. swap partition, 2G
3. /, 2G
4. logical partition, rest of disk, which contains the following:
5. /var, 2G
6. /usr, 7G
7. /opt, 5G
8. /home, rest of logical partition.

That should last me for quite a while. If you are installing SUSE, or another Linux, these are the kinds of partition sizes you should be thinking about. Use my original partition sizes only if you use mostly what is installed by default by your Linux distribution, and not much else.